Summary Remarks

Summary

“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

F. Bacon

Highlights

For the reader who has only a couple of moments to spare, the strongest overall impressions from “analysis of emission lines” were (1) infrared and ultraviolet astronomy have merged with optical astronomy in their techniques and power, and no longer need to be considered separately (except that Dufour and Dinerstein do these things so well); (2) limited wavelength resolution keeps this from being the case yet in X-ray astronomy, though planned missions promise improvements (Mushotzky), while gamma ray emission, coming largely from nuclear rather than atomic processes, will continue to require very different approaches (Ramaty); (3) the enormous growth of detailed atomic data (Pradhan) and sophisticated techniques for handling the partial redistribution of photons across line profiles and other non-linear processes in radiative transfer (Hummer) means that current computing power is not yet able to implement the best calculations that we, in principle, know how to do, especially for intrinsically complex systems like supernovae (Pinto) and lumpy stellar winds (Drew); and (4) there is something reassuring about encountering a large body of astronomical endeavor to which it matters hardly at all whether or not the early universe was dominated by a Gaussian, Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum of adiabatic fluctuations in biased Cold Dark Matter.